THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

"Unless these plans are allowed to reduce benefits, nothing can prevent some of these plans from certain insolvency.” What was needed was further “sacrifice” insisted Hansen, whose 2013 salary of $350,960 is ten to twenty times the average pensionof a supermarket worker.

SLASH PENSIONS FOR BIGGER BONUSES FOR C.E.O.’ and UNION BOSSES?

UNIONS PARTNER WITH
OBAMA AND CONGRESS TO ASSAULT THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS….

MCALLEN,
Texas -- Almost 200 Americans have been kidnapped in Mexico this past year; 79
of those kidnappings took place just south of the Texas border in the Mexican
State of Tamaulipas, according to an FBI interview with Breitbart Texas.

While the
Mexican government continues to praise their security
campaign in Tamaulipas, shootouts, kidnappings, extortions and highway
robberies continue to plague the border state.

In Mexico a
person is kidnapped every six hours, according to the statistics published by
Mexico’s National Citizens Observatory, a
non-profit organization that keeps track of crime figures.

Breitbart
Texas met with FBI Special Agent Michelle Lee who spoke about the number of
kidnappings in Mexico that the agency has investigated in 2014. While in
2006, the agency only had 26 kidnappings, so far this year the agency has
looked into 199 kidnappings.

“Kidnapping for ransom remains a very rare
occurrence in the United States,” Lee said.

However in
Mexico, kidnapping has become a moneymaker for criminals looking to make a
quick profit.

“In about
fifty percent of all the kidnappings of U.S. citizens in Mexico a ransom demand
is made,” Lee said. “In those instances a financial gain is generally the
motive and typically it is a crime of opportunity.”

The agent
advises to avoid displaying cash or other items that could make a victim
attractive to kidnappers.

Currently
the U.S. Department of State has a standing travel advisory warning Americans
about the security conditions in Mexico and warns them about traveling on
highways at night and of the potential dangers in each state.

The FBI has
a strong working relationship with Mexican federal authorities including an elite
anti-kidnapping unit that has allowed the agency to solve the majority of the
kidnappings in Mexico, she said.

In the other
fifty percent of crimes where a ransom call is not made there is some
connection with organized crime.

“In those
cases you may have the victim involved in illicit activity, or the victim being
related to someone who is involved or in some cases it may be a case of
mistaken identity where the person targeted was in fact tied to criminal
activity,” Lee said.

Regardless
of the ties, the agency investigates all cases accordingly with the victim’s
safety as their highest priority, she said.

And for others, it
means exemption from even immigration law itself. Take the case of Cinthya
Garcia-Cisneros, part of Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program. After being convicted of two felony hit-and-run deaths in Oregon, she
received probation. The government then dropped its immigration action against
her. She's now free and eligible for both a work permit and a Social Security
number.

................... it's hardly a secret that unions have partnered with Obama's amnesty hoax to legalize Mexico's looting. Millions of Mexicans illegally in our borders and jobs are just waiting to be exploited by these historically corrupt unions!

"The unions have long been accomplices in the looting of pensionsand retiree health benefits. In the 1980s, they collaborated with corporate raiders and executives who stole pension money to finance leveraged buyouts, fund golden parachutes and conceal slumping profits. The unions established the closest ties to Wall Street, peddling such financial scams as Employee Stock OwnershipPlans (ESOPS) that put union officials on corporate boards and left workers penniless."

US unions back historic assault on workers’ pensions

17 December 2014

Last week, the US Congress approved a bipartisan “pension reform” measure that will undo 40 years of retirement income rights for industrial and other private-sector workers in the United States.

Coming on the heels of the ruling in the Detroit bankruptcy case overturning state constitutional protections for public employee pensions, the new measure, included in the federal budget bill backed by the White House and passed over the weekend, opens the floodgates to the gutting of pensions for current retirees across the country and in every sector of the economy.

It marks a major escalation of a social counterrevolution that aims to take back every gain won by workers in the 20th century.

The pension provision was backed by major corporations such as UPS and Kroger and by trade unions that jointly administer so-called “multi-employer” pension plans covering 10 million retired and active workers in the trucking, coal mining, construction and other industries.

Cynically pitched as a means of “saving” financially troubled plans and protecting retiree benefits, the bill allows employer and union trustees to “adjust” monthly pension checks, with cuts expected to range from 10 to 30 percent.

While US employers, with the complicity of the unions, have repeatedly frozen or reduced benefits for future retirees, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 prohibited the rescinding or reduction of benefits for those already in retirement. The law made payment of these vested benefits legally binding on employers. It also required corporations to pay into the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) to insure a portion of the pension benefits if they sought to escape their obligations through bankruptcy.

The new bill permits preemptive cuts in benefits from still-solvent pension funds if the funds are deemed to be in a “critical status.” While the bill ostensibly allows retirees to vote against such cuts, their votes can be overridden if the pension plan is considered big enough to pose a threat to the solvency of the PBGC.

As it is, the average annual pension of the 410,000retired truck drivers and warehousemen enrolled in the Teamsters Central States pension fund is only $15,000. A 10-30 percent cut will throw hundreds of thousands of retirees and surviving spouses into poverty and lead to early deaths.

The Pension Rights Center declared that the bill “sets a terrible precedent,” encouraging similar cuts in state and local pension plans as well as in Social Security and Medicare. The Wall Street Journal noted the watershed character of the measure in a December 14 article, headlined “Pension Bill Seen as Model for Further Cuts.”

The financial oligarchy has long coveted the trillions of dollars in pension money owed to workers. The campaign by both big business parties and the media over the supposed “pension crisis” has provided a political cover for theft on a grand scale. The ruling class seeks nothing less than to turn the clock back to the days whenworkers were forced to labor until they dropped dead.

In this attack, the working class faces in the union apparatus an enemy no less savage than the corporations. The pension measure is largely based on the February 2013 document “Solutions, Not Bailouts,” drawn up by the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans (NCCMP), a joint labor-management body that includes the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and several construction unions.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$NO BAILOUTS FOR PENSIONS.... BAILOUTS ARE ONLY FOR CRIMINAL BANKSTERS!!!$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

As the title of the document implies, the unions reject any call for a Wall Street-style government rescue of the pension funds and accept without question that the working class must pay to keep the funds solvent. The union executives know full well that the funds have been depleted due to the failure of corporations to keep up their payments as well as losses resulting from speculative investments by union trustees and their Wall Street advisors in thesub-prime mortgage bubble that crashed in 2007-08.

In a joint letter urging Senate leaders to pass the legislation, UFCW President Joseph T. Hansen and the CEO of the Kroger supermarket chain noted that they had already increased pensioncontributions from workers and reduced their benefits. Nevertheless, Hansen co-wrote: “Unless these plans are allowed to reduce benefits, nothing can prevent some of these plans from certain insolvency.” What was needed was further “sacrifice” insisted Hansen, whose 2013 salary of $350,960 is ten to twenty times the average pension of a supermarket worker.

The unions have long been accomplices in the looting of pensions and retiree health benefits. In the 1980s, they collaborated with corporate raiders and executives who stole pension money to finance leveraged buyouts, fund golden parachutes and conceal slumping profits. The unions established the closest ties to WallStreet, peddling such financial scams as Employee Stock OwnershipPlans (ESOPS) that put union officials on corporate boards and left workers penniless.

Even as the number of union members and their wages and benefits plummeted over the ensuing three-and-a-half decades, the businessmen who run the unions parleyed these connections into lucrative careers through the administration of pension, retiree health care and housing investment funds worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

Established in 2011, the AFL-CIO’s $4 billion Equity Index Fund is a case in point. As a glossy brochure entitled “Investing In Ourselves” boasts, the fund “tracks the S&P 500 closely, outperforming 89 percent of its peer funds in every period measured.”

The unions have a direct financial incentive to lower both the benefits and life expectancy of workers. They are determined to reduce payouts from pension funds that provide a source of income to the parasites who control these misnamed “labor organizations.” Similarly, as holders of corporate stock, they have a direct interest in lowering the wages of their members in order to boost profits andstock prices.

Workers cannot fight the corporate-government attack within the framework of organizations that are completely hostile to their interests. They must rise up against these bureaucratic, corrupt anti-working class outfits and build new, democratic organizations of struggle.

Every day it becomes clearer that the most elementary social rights—to a decent-paying job and a secure retirement—are incompatible with the profit system. Just as clear is the failure of a “labor movement” based on the defense of capitalism and nationalism.

The new organizations of the working class must be part of a mass movement for the international unity of workers in the fight for socialism.

Jerry White

SERVING THE 1%... AMNESTY, IT’S
ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED

Income inequality
grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.

In the two advanced countries with the greatest income
inequality, Spain and the United States, job
losses and wage cuts accounted for nearly all the increase in inequality.

“A more recent national survey by the
Federal Reserve, based on 2013 data, suggests the problem has not only
persisted as the economy recovered but may even have worsened. More than 30
percent of Americans reported spikes and dips in their incomes. Among that
group, 42 percent cited an irregular work schedule; an additional 27 percent
blamed a span of joblessness or seasonal work.”

"In the two advanced countries with the greatest income
inequality, Spain and the United States, job losses and wage cuts accounted for nearly all the
increase in inequality."

US Congress to vote on union-backed plan to cutworkers’ pensions

A bipartisan proposal has been added to the US
government funding bill now before Congress that would end 40 years of federal
law and sanction the reduction of pension payments to millions of retired
truckers, coal miners, supermarket, construction workers and other private
sector workers.

These are self-serving lies pumped out by the ruling class
through its political servants and media apologists. Since the financial crash
of 2008, the Obama administration’s pro-business policies of bank bailouts,
virtually free money for the banks from the Federal Reserve, wage and benefit
cuts for auto workers, corporate tax cuts and deregulation have transferred
trillions from the working class to the super-rich.

Instead, the financial oligarchy that controls the economy and
both big-business parties is determined to steal the pensions that tens of
millions need to survive and return workers to the dark days when they labored
without end until they died.

"President Obama is going
rogue, doubling-down, and driving full speed towards a constitutional
crisis," Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who’s chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

For
their part, US trade unions such as the United Auto Workers have functioned as
junior partners in the impoverishment and exploitation of the working class,
suppressing any opposition to the attack on living standards.

In
this corporate America has enjoyed the full backing of the Obama administration
and both big business parties, which have slashed food stamps and long-term
unemployment benefits. The White House, which orchestrated the slashing of
wages in the auto industry restructuring of 2009, has made the lowering of
living standards for US workers the centerpiece of its so-called revival of
American manufacturing.